Boomsday – Book Review

Boomsday is the latest effort by political novelist Christopher Buckley. If you watched (and loved) the sly, hilarious Thank You For Smoking, you’ll enjoy this book, with certain caveats.

Boomsday’s characters live in the near future and inhabit an America brought to the breaking point by six overseas wars and a crippling economic deficit. The “youth” of the nation is eminently pissed at Congress for passing backbreaking taxation against people under 30 – all for the express purpose of paying out Social Security to the 77 million retiring Boomer fat cats. When a 29 year old hottie encourages her blog readers to “take action” against Boomer retirement communities, all hell breaks loose (or as book jacket writers like to say: sets off a chain reaction).

Buckley is a pretty funny guy who can make jokes of the disabled (a central character wears a prosthetic leg) and get away with it, the book suffers from trying hard to sound, for lack of a better phrase, new media-ish. The book abounds with references to Google, web spiders, blogging, enterprise software and consumer web. However, anyone borderline tech savvy will recognize most of these references as complete nonsense.

Case in point: A major character in the book has designed a piece of software called “Spider Repellent”, which finds and erases web pages that correspond to a certain set of keywords. In short, this is stupid and irritating to read.

Another ding: The whole book is premised around the popularity of Cassandra Devine’s blog, but there is no explanation of why she became popular in the first place or why the hell she of all people gives a rat’s ass about Social Security reform.

If you are willing to suspend disbelief in these cases, though, it’s a quick, fun beach read. I give it 3 stars.

Why Dating is Like Software Sales

If you’ve ever worked in an enterprise software company at the same time as being single, maybe you’ve noticed the similarities between dating and software sales. Here’s how:

• Putting on a match.com profile is like going to a trade show.
• Always out and about on the prowl? It’s called lead generation, folks.
• Meeting different girls? Going on many first dates?  How about calling it what it is: a sales pipeline?
• Going on ten dates without a goodnight kiss – poor ROI.
• Getting fixed up by a friend? Well, that sounds a lot like inside sales supporting corporate sales, doesn’t it?
• Getting screwed out of a makeout session by the girl’s annoying prissy little twit of a roommate? We like to call it bureaucratic wrangling and internal politics.
• And finally, the single man’s dating mantra, which aligns so well with the sales cliche: “Always be closing (ABC)”. Need I say more?

Depressing? Natch. Disgusting in its objectification of relationships? Of course. But funny trumps all, folks.